Numbers add up to scholarship

Riley grad making mark in ND's math department.

Riley grad making mark in ND's math department.

May 12, 2006|JUDY BRADFORD Tribune Correspondent

Adam Boocher remembers the first time he discovered that math was fun. "I was in a regular algebra class at Riley High School, and the teacher said a competition was coming up. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into, but I went ahead and did it anyway. "I found out that math was a lot of fun, and you met cool people. I realized it was something I enjoyed." As a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame, he now realizes that math "is beautiful. You can really see why the Greeks were fascinated by it. It all adds up, and it's all based on solid logic." Boocher, 20, is gifted at math. In his first year at Notre Dame, he was invited into the Research Experience for Undergraduates in math, a program usually reserved for the best sophomores. This year, he is also the only Notre Dame winner of a Goldwater Scholarship. Named after 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, the scholarship is for undergraduates who plan to earn their doctorates in math, and it pays up to $7,500 for two years of college. Boocher would like to teach, eventually, and do research. But first, he has two more years of college. This summer, he'll be studying "knot theory" at Pomona College, near Los Angeles under a National Science Foundation program. It's the study of how knots work -- the reforming of them and their mathematical properties, he explains. "If you took a string and tied it into a knot and glued the ends together," he says, asking one of the questions he'll be researching, "would you then be able to reform it into another knot? "It's a sub-branch of topology, the study of shapes." In the semester he just completed, he also took a graduate-level course in Riemannian geometry, which is standard geometry but on a curved surface -- like the earth. "You study things like triangles, but you see if they will have different properties simply because they are on a curved surface," he says, demonstrating an ability to explain complicated math concepts in simple terms. Boocher isn't a math nerd. He can talk about other things too. Known as "the Boosh" in high school, he played the violin in the school orchestra, participated in school plays and Mock Trial as well as Science Olympiads and Quiz Bowl. He's good with words, and plays competitive Scrabble. Usually, the competitions are in Detroit and Battle Creek, but this summer, there's one in Phoenix he plans to attend. He and his roommate, Andrew Fanoe, from Atlanta, are also working to form a Scrabble club on campus, and it looks like it may be an official club by this fall. But that's just a pastime. Numbers are the 9-to-5 game for this young man who started counting, and could barely stop, when he was 4 years old. "As a child, I tried to count as high as possible. So I counted to 412. The story goes that when I told my aunt that I had counted to 412, she said 'Well, why didn't you count to 413?'æ" Notre Dame representatives say that Boocher came to Notre Dame's math department well-prepared to study. Of his Riley math teachers, Boocher says "Mrs. (Carol) Wallace was passionate about geometry, and Mr. (Larry) Morningstar (now retired) gave us really fun math problems, with applications to geometry." Boocher is the son of Linda and Sean Boocher of South Bend.